The making of Holocaust education in Britain, 1945–1991

ABSTRACT

Despite the prevalence of research in Holocaust memory and Holocaust education, the historical development of British Holocaust education remains understudied. This paper reconstructs this history, presenting Anglo-Jewish efforts to teach about the Holocaust in the 1970s for the first time and using the concept of ‘cosmopolitan memory’ to explain its proliferation in the early 1980s. This article argues that the origins of contemporary Holocaust education should not be found in the increase of its teaching with the National Curriculum of 1991 but in the changing culture of memory and history teaching in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

KEYWORDS:

• Holocaust education
• collective memory
• Anglo-Jewry
• Holocaust memory
• history of education

Introduction

Teaching about the Holocaust is almost ubiquitous in Britain today. The most recent national research has shown that the overwhelming majority of children are taught about the destruction of European Jewry while ‘Holocaust education’ has developed into a distinct field of educational theory and practice which – despite divergences over pedagogical approaches and historiographical interpretations – is united by a shared belief in its singular importance.¹ This belief grows from the central principle that rather than simply learning about the Holocaust, students can learn from it.² Rather than being simply another event that is taught in the history classroom, the Holocaust has become an instrument for ‘civic and moral goals.’³

There has been no shortage of research into this realm of history teaching, with scholars engaging deeply with both the theory and practice of Holocaust education. However, there exists a gap in our understanding of the historical development of British Holocaust education: namely, the Holocaust’s place in education before it was included in the National Curriculum for History in 1991, when it was nationally mandated for the first time. There is no doubt that teaching about the Holocaust in this early period was sporadic and relatively rare: the first national study in 1987 depicted ‘disorganization, a lack of co-ordination, and a collective ambivalence’ towards Holocaust education.⁴ Existing work, however, reflects the divide between pre- and post-National Curriculum teaching, at the expense of our understanding of Holocaust memory in twentieth-century Britain.

Textbook analysis, for instance, has largely been restricted to the post-National Curriculum era, as it was only in response to the increased demand for teaching materials after 1991 that textbooks dealing with the Holocaust became widely available.⁵ An exception to this is Keith Crawford’s analysis of presentations of Germany in pre-1960 history textbooks, which showed that there was little discussion of the Nazis’ treatment of the Jews in these materials.⁶ Most narrative accounts of the development of Holocaust education in Britain have similarly focused on the post-1991 period. Susan Hector’s otherwise detailed analysis of teaching about the Holocaust in the 1990s simply described pre-National Curriculum Holocaust education as ‘rather a hit-and-miss affair, dependent upon individual teachers’ interests.’⁷ Similarly, Geoffrey Short and Carol Ann Reed’s research did little beyond recognizing the lack of Holocaust education before 1991, which they explained through reference to the wider context of limited discussion of the Holocaust.⁸

Unlike these works, this article seeks to understand the ways in which the Holocaust was conceptualized educationally before the increased memorialization of the Holocaust at the end of the twentieth century. In so doing, it builds on the research of two historians who have moved beyond a simplistic depiction of an absence of Holocaust education before 1991 and instead highlighted the earlier origins of systematic teaching about the Holocaust. For Lucy Russell, the distribution of teaching materials related to the Holocaust by the Inner London Education Authority (ILEA) in the mid-1980s was a ‘pioneering’ recognition of the importance of Holocaust education that began the process that would lead to its inclusion in the National Curriculum at the end of the decade.⁹ In his more general study of British Holocaust memory, Andy Pearce uses the concept of ‘informal education’ to trace the origins of Holocaust education slightly earlier: he highlights how the Imperial War Museum began discussing the Holocaust with visiting school groups in 1978, while also pointing out that wider national awareness of the Holocaust would certainly have influenced educators.¹⁰ Both of these accounts, however, see the introduction of the National Curriculum as the central landmark in the history of British Holocaust education. This article, on the other hand, will suggest that while the creation of the National Curriculum may have represented a quantitative turning point in the teaching of the Holocaust, it was in fact during the late 1970s that a critical juncture was reached, in which the qualitative aspects of modern Holocaust education were established.

This is an argument that draws upon two wider analyses of Holocaust memory. Firstly, it is important to note that understanding of the events of the Holocaust was fractured for much of the postwar period and that it was not until the late 1980s and 1990s that the Holocaust was widely seen as relevant to the present in Britain. Tony Kushner has shown how this development was ‘intimately connected with the move from a liberal assimilationist ideology to a more pluralistic vision of British society.’¹¹ As this article will show, this was a dynamic that would be central to the evolution of Holocaust education.

Secondly, the Holocaust is understood to occupy an unconventional position within collective memory. History education, through its production of collective memory, has long been understood as a pivotal part of the construction of identity.¹² These identities have traditionally been based on national or communal groups, particularly in history classrooms where the content of lessons has typically been directed by the state. However, Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider have argued that Holocaust memory in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries was a ‘cosmopolitan memory’ that worked to establish or reinforce values of multiculturalism rather than distinct group identities.¹³ This is a ‘memory transcending ethnic and national boundaries’ that is fundamentally different from the traditional memory communities typically produced by history teaching.¹⁴ Following Kushner’s analysis, this cosmopolitan understanding of the Holocaust started to become dominant in Britain in the late 1980s and early 1990s. This is not to say that there are no national or local differences in Holocaust memory, a fact which has featured in critiques of the concept of cosmopolitan memory.¹⁵ However, this is a critique that focuses on the outcomes of a cosmopolitan approach to collective memory. Instead, this article will use the concept of cosmopolitan memory to analyse intentions rather than outcomes; it will be understood as seeing the Holocaust as a universal signifier of ‘moral evil’ and therefore using collective memory of the event to encourage values rather than build a national or ethnic identity.¹⁶ Using this conceptual basis, this article argues that contemporary Holocaust education is an example of cosmopolitan memory. It will show that the development of cultural, educational, and political conditions in which history teaching in Britain could move beyond national frameworks of collective memory proved crucial in the creation of Holocaust education as it is understood today.

This article presents the chronological growth of Holocaust education under these changing conditions before 1991. It begins with a brief outline of how the Holocaust was presented in mainstream education before the late 1970s, drawing upon a range of classroom textbooks; while the subject was largely avoided in this period, the rare instances of its inclusion highlight how it functioned as a tool of national collective memory. It then uses sources from Britain’s Jewish community, including The Jewish Chronicle, to show that a similar dynamic existed in the Anglo-Jewish community, where the gradual growth of educational initiatives about the Holocaust functioned to strengthen Jewish communal identity. However, this paper’s analysis of organizational correspondence from the Board of Deputies of British Jews in the late 1970s and early 1980s shows both a substantial increase in educational understandings of the Holocaust in this period and that this can only be understood in terms of a shift from the production of traditional collective memory to cosmopolitan memory. Finally, it will examine the burgeoning field of Holocaust education in the 1980s and highlight the ways in which it had become intrinsically linked to a value-oriented civic education, rather than as part of a traditional national or group narrative of the past. Absent from many accounts of the history of Holocaust education due to their focus on later developments, this was a pivotal turning point that continues to shape how the Holocaust is taught today.

Depictions of the Holocaust in mainstream education, c.1945–c.1970

Between 1945 and the 1970s, popular understanding of the Holocaust was minimal, with Jewish survivors often reluctant to discuss the events and Western culture yet more reluctant to recognize the Holocaust as a specific phenomenon.¹⁷ It was not even until the 1960s that the term itself came into widespread use. In this context, it is unsurprising that teaching about the Holocaust took place only in rare instances. While history teaching before the National Curriculum was not explicitly directed by the state, John Slater has described how ‘content was largely British […] it was an inherited consensus, based largely on hidden assumptions.’¹⁸ This consensus had little space for the teaching of the Holocaust. One of the limits was practical, with many syllabi simply not including twentieth-century history. The idea of teaching about Nazi Germany was specifically addressed in a pamphlet produced by the Ministry of Education which was in print until the early 1960s: while it encouraged some aspects of twentieth-century history, it suggested that ‘we shall have to wait for a long time for a balanced appraisal of Fascism or Nazism.’¹⁹ Regardless of other factors such as public consciousness of the Holocaust, the assumption that recent history should not be included in classrooms was a significant impediment to the teaching of the Holocaust for much of the postwar period.

However, it would be incorrect to suggest that the events of the Second World War never featured in postwar history teaching. Policy in this period allowed considerable scope for teachers to pursue their own interests and a small number of textbooks were produced to help those who wished to teach such recent events.²⁰ One of the most detailed depictions of the extermination of European Jews in textbooks of this period came immediately after the war. In a book of guidance for teachers produced in 1949, Catherine Firth noted that the Nazis were ‘set upon a policy of literal extermination’ of the Jews.²¹ However, it also argued that ‘the horrors of the concentration camps, torture, and mass murders perpetrated before and during the Second World War cannot be put before children in detail.’²² Although this textbook was an exception to the general trend, it does point to another reason why the Holocaust was generally avoided by teachers. Produced shortly after the end of the war – and the transmission of images of the Western camps which ‘inspired a feeling of intense and profound shock almost universally among the people they reached’ – this textbook demonstrated the difficulty of coming to terms with the genocide even when it was accurately recognized as such.²³ Beyond the practical restrictions of history teaching in this period, the emotional and conceptual incomprehensibility of the Holocaust also acted to stymie its presence in classrooms immediately following the Second World War.

This textbook reflected a brief period of popular knowledge about the Holocaust that followed media depictions of the concentration camps and the Nuremberg Trials; soon after its publication, however, this awareness of the genocide was replaced by a dominant image of the Second World War as a ‘more “traditional” military conflict.’²⁴ This produced the conditions that would define the lack of teaching about the Holocaust until the 1980s. While there were of course changes to teaching in this period, almost all teachers remained committed to a history education that focused on establishing a widely accepted narrative about the British national past, an educational culture that the destruction of European Jewry struggled to fit into. When Nazi antisemitism was presented in history textbooks, it would often be used to construct an image of German savagery contrasted against British tolerance; this follows Crawford’s more general conclusions about textbook depictions of Germany.²⁵ One modern history textbook first printed in 1949 included over thirty pages about Nazi Germany and the Second World War and while it did not describe the killing of Jews specifically, it did discuss Nazi antisemitism. However, this was to distinguish Germany from ‘such countries as France, Britain, Holland’ where antisemitism had apparently ‘for some time been absent.’²⁶ Such a dichotomous presentation of Germany and Britain continued into textbooks produced in the 1960s. One textbook, Recent Times, described how ‘millions of Jews and other enemies of Nazi rule were deliberately done to death, or imprisoned under conditions of appalling cruelty.’²⁷ However, this was subsumed into a larger image of German hatred of ‘Communists, Jews, and other traitors,’ suggesting that the primary focus of the textbook’s presentation of the Holocaust was to produce a negative image of Germany that could be opposed to a positive British self-image.²⁸ This nationalist presentation of German barbarism was also evident in a textbook published in 1968, which had no specific mention of the treatment of Jews but did suggest that the Poles were ‘treated virtually as slaves.’²⁹ A textbook series that continued to be used into the 1970s similarly avoided discussing antisemitism and instead included the history of Nazi Germany only in a wider unit on ‘dictatorship.’³⁰ Presenting Germany as a tyrannical opposite to Britain thus held precedence over teaching about the Holocaust. Two features are evident in all of these examples. Firstly, they can be clearly categorized as patriotic representations of history that were concerned with the ‘transmission of a positive story about the national past.’³¹ Secondly, there is a lack of consideration for the specific treatment of the Jews in the Second World War. As Kushner has argued:

Britain’s war memory was essential to its post-1945 national identity. It was too precious, it must be argued, to have been brought into question by the experiences of another people […] the history of the Jews was particularly problematic: it was a story with no redemptive ending, which contrasted markedly with the British case.³²

The practical issues of an ‘inherited consensus’ that largely avoided twentieth-century history and the emotional difficulty of conveying the Holocaust to children were certainly reasons for the lack of teaching about the Holocaust in this period. However, the expectation that history teaching would aim to construct a national collective memory seriously limited any presentations of the Jewish plight during the Second World War. It was therefore not until this assumption was widely challenged in the late 1970s that the Holocaust could begin to have an increasing presence in British classrooms.

Early Holocaust education and Anglo-Jewry, 1945–1976

Given the pervasiveness of national narratives in history education in the postwar period, one might expect that the Holocaust would have been more widely taught in Jewish education. However, for much of this period a British framework of memory shaped Anglo-Jewish representations of the past, meaning that the idea of teaching about the Holocaust is rarely seen in sources from the Anglo-Jewish community before the 1970s. Despite having specifically Jewish characteristics – usually in religious education and the teaching of Hebrew – most Jewish day schools in twentieth-century Britain worked in an assimilationist tradition that began with the arrival of large numbers of Eastern European Jewish immigrants in the late nineteenth century.³³ Before the Second World War, Jewish schools included many identifiers of a quintessentially English education: ‘the children learned English literature, history, geography, songs and games, and they celebrated Empire Day, Armistice Day and May Day festivities.’³⁴ Historians have tended to emphasize similar traits in the Anglo-Jewish community more generally, which has typically had ‘remarkable’ levels of social and political integration.³⁵ Despite – or in part because of – the Holocaust, aversions to particularistic expressions of identity were accentuated in the immediate postwar period. Continued universalist attitudes, worries about antisemitism, and ‘a simple inability to grasp the actuality of what was happening’ ensured that there was little space for commemoration of the specifically Jewish tragedy of the Holocaust within the institutions of Anglo-Jewry.³⁶ The first attempt to honor the Holocaust in Britain, through the establishment of a memorial to those killed in the Warsaw Ghetto, was led by Polish Jews with the Board of Deputies playing only a nominal role.³⁷ It is therefore unsurprising that Jewish educational institutions largely avoided the topic of the Holocaust in the first two decades after the Second World War, instead conforming to the demands of a British memory framework and sharing many similarities with non-Jewish history teaching. However, an assimilatory tendency was not the only reason for this absence of the Holocaust in Jewish education: it was also obviously difficult to make the genocide presentable to children and incorporate it into a positive story about the Jewish people. This meant that even supplementary schooling, which had less incentive to downplay Jewish issues, struggled to include the Holocaust; by the end of the 1940s, a syllabus for Talmud Torah schools in Manchester could include Biblical history, modern Jewish literature, and the establishment of the state of Israel, but have no reference to the killing in Europe.³⁸

It was only from Jewish communities outside of the country – who did not follow the distinct traditions of Anglo-Jewry – that the first evidence appears of Holocaust memory and education being linked in Britain. At a conference organized by the Board of Deputies in 1962, the visiting Israeli historian Shaul Esh noted that:

what strikes one most is the impression that the tremendous events which happened to Jewish people in our generation, and which have made so great an impact on Jewish life, have hardly made an impact on Jewish education in this country.³⁹

That a discussion about both religious and secular Jewish education could have had no other reference to the Holocaust is itself a reflection of the almost complete absence of teaching about the Holocaust even in Jewish education in this period. Similarly, a letter published in the Jewish Chronicle, a British newspaper, from a reader in New York in 1960 criticised the ‘ignorance […] on the part of Jewish boys and girls (and young men and young women) of the great disaster that befell their people only a few short years ago.’⁴⁰ Identifying education as the solution to this collective forgetting, the reader asked:

Why should not such books as Anne Frank’s ‘Diary’ or [Emanuel] Ringleblum’s ‘Notes’ be made text-books for a history course in Jewish schools. If a Jewish child in Warsaw was compelled to witness the murder of his parents before his eyes, then should the Jewish child in the Bronx or Stamford Hill be completely shielded from such revelations? Can this be the new assimilation, replacing the threats of a liberal education or of intermarriage?⁴¹

These were both appeals to an image of the Holocaust as a specifically Jewish tragedy, the memory of which was felt to be a crucial part of Jewish identity. These early examples of the idea of Holocaust education in the early 1960s thus conceptualized it as a tool for the creation of communal collective memory, although the reluctance to promote Jewish identity on the part of Anglo-Jewish leaders meant that these calls remained on the fringes.

The complexity of situating the Holocaust within the competing demands of national and communal memory shaped one of the first examples of the Holocaust in Jewish educational settings. This took place in 1964 in the King David School in Manchester, a Jewish day school, where ‘more than 250 adults and young people gathered […] to commemorate the 21st anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.’⁴² Although it was not the classroom-centered form of Holocaust education as it is understood today, this nevertheless attributed pedagogical meaning to Holocaust memorialization. It was seen as an important opportunity to construct Jewish collective memory: the Jewish Chronicle reported that the chairman of the Communal Council ‘emphasized the need to remind the youth of the Holocaust.’⁴³ At the same time, however, the service included the ‘sounding of the “Last Post” by J.L.B [Jewish Lads’ Brigade] buglers and the lowering of the standards of Ajex [Association of Jewish Ex-Servicemen and Women] and the Sydney Frankenburg branch of the British Legion.’⁴⁴ It has been argued that such inclusion of ‘military symbolism’ in British war commemoration ‘helped to sustain the post-war identity story of a heroic nation which had suffered to bring greater peace and stability to the world.’⁴⁵ Insofar as this memorialization had an educational intent, it was not therefore to build a specifically Jewish collective memory; rather, it seemed to be a compromise between the desire to remember the victims of the Ghetto and to maintain alignment with British strategies of remembrance. Of course, this remained a commemoration of the Holocaust rather than the Second World War more generally and the early 1960s had seen the place of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising become increasingly central to Anglo-Jewish cultural memory.⁴⁶ Again though, this was largely due to the relative ease with which it could be integrated into existing frameworks of memory. Kushner has noted that ‘the ghetto revolt could at least be placed in the context of armed resistance during the war’ while also functioning as ‘an illustration of Jewish solidarity and a useful antidote to the widespread belief in Jewish passivity.’⁴⁷ These qualities seem to be evident in the King David School’s commemoration, while the Jewish Chronicle’s use of the term ‘martyrs’ to describe those killed in the uprising reflects the fact that this was a prevalent feature of Anglo-Jewish memory in this period.

This struggle to play down Jewish specificity came to an end in the late 1960s, which allowed for a profound evolution in Jewish Holocaust education. The Six-Day War of 1967 led to what Todd Endelman has called a ‘revolution in Jewish self-consciousness,’ whereby Jewish identity in Britain was significantly strengthened.⁴⁸ This increased assertiveness meant that Jewish educational strategies began to intend to strengthen communal memory, rather than following the expectations of British collective memory. By the early 1970s, this had meant that the Warsaw Ghetto uprising had developed into a deliberate site of education in the Anglo-Jewish community. In this period, therefore, the first signs of an organized effort to establish strategies for teaching about the Holocaust were evident, despite the focus of scholars such as Lucy Russell on the apparent origins of Holocaust education in the early 1980s. This can clearly be seen in the records of the Board of Deputies’ Education and Youth Committee: in 1972, it gave ‘long and careful consideration’ to a ‘Warsaw Ghetto and Holocaust Commemoration for young people.’⁴⁹ The committee intended to produce a presentation that was ‘specially suitable for the understanding and involvement of children aged 11–14 years,’ but the paucity of educational materials about the Holocaust in Britain meant that they would have to ask American and Israeli institutions for assistance.⁵⁰ The Holocaust was thus beginning to be understood by some in the Board of Deputies as a topic to be taught to Jewish children. The 1973 presentation took the form of a dramatic production entitled ‘You are the Witnesses: The Destruction of the Innocent’ that was performed by a Jewish drama youth group.⁵¹ The didactic intentions of this presentation were suggested by its title: the students who attended were encouraged to ‘witness’ the Holocaust and remember its victims. It aimed to educate students about the Holocaust and, in the words of the Education and Youth Committee, to ‘involve young people at a level leading to their proper appreciation of the tragedy and significance of the Ghetto Uprising.’⁵² This was not an unqualified success – it was limited to Jewish communities close to London and was only attended by 130 of the expected 480 students – which highlights the novelty of the endeavor.⁵³ However, as it represented the first institutional effort to teach about the Holocaust, the commemoration was a significant milestone in the development of Holocaust education in Britain. It was then followed by a similar presentation in 1974.⁵⁴ This commemoration, called ‘Heroes with Hope,’ also used a dramatic performance but ended with a ‘Question and Answer session’ including a panel of experts on Jewish history, suggesting a growing belief in the importance of teaching young people about the Holocaust.⁵⁵ A cultural shift in Anglo-Jewry had thus allowed the Board of Deputies to use the memorialization of the Warsaw Ghetto to establish the first educational initiatives relating to the Holocaust, even though these existed almost entirely outside of the classroom. This was accompanied by the adoption of a new set of official aims for the Committee in 1975, which moved beyond simply promoting religious education to encouraging teaching about Israel, ‘Hebrew as a living language,’ and ‘the history of Diaspora Jewry and of the tragic horror of the Holocaust.’⁵⁶ All of this meant that the early origins of Holocaust education were intended to strengthen Jewish identity through collective memory, following the traditional model of memory and history education.

However, this burgeoning annual tradition of educational presentations about the Warsaw Ghetto had come to an abrupt stop by 1976. The Committee decided that no production would be arranged for 1975, although they still envisioned that a commemoration would take place in 1976.⁵⁷ By June, the idea of holding a single presentation based in London had been dismissed in favor of ‘encouraging a series of local projects.’⁵⁸ This likely reflected the Committee’s change in focus towards classroom teaching about the Holocaust. Classroom Holocaust education was at this point beginning to be discussed in detail in America and Israel, debates that were reported in Britain by the Jewish Chronicle.⁵⁹ Early forms of this had already been explored by the committee: after the 1974 presentation, materials were sent to teachers in Jewish schools, while they were also asked about their views on including the Warsaw Ghetto uprising in classes.⁶⁰ Given the committee’s limited resources – and the mixed success of the presentations – there was clearly a belief that encouraging the teaching of the Holocaust in schools would be a better way of building collective memory of the Holocaust. The committee intended to spend 1976 ‘sponsoring a scheme concerned with methods and problems for teachers’ who taught about the Holocaust in the classroom, moving beyond the model of annual presentations but remaining focused on education in the Jewish community by targeting day schools and Hebrew classes.⁶¹ However, the Committee soon ran into difficulties and their attempt to change Jewish syllabi was eventually thwarted by the ‘impossibility of bringing together the educational bodies involved.’⁶² Despite these practical issues, the intentions of the Committee provide a clear insight into how the Holocaust was increasingly understood as a topic of education; introducing it into classrooms was seen as the next step in encouraging Holocaust memory among Jewish children.

These early examples of Holocaust education were conceptualized as instruments of a collective memory that was specific to the Jewish community. Despite their limitations, the complete absence of any form of Holocaust pedagogy had been overcome, while ‘a growing self-confidence among sections of British Jewry’ in the 1970s had allowed the Anglicized forms of commemoration that marked the 1964 service in Manchester to be jettisoned in favor of an education that aimed to build Jewish communal memory.⁶³ These early endeavors have largely been overlooked by historians. While David Cesarani briefly noted the 1972 commemoration, he downplayed its significance by emphasizing that ‘ten years passed’ before the Board of Deputies’ initiatives worked with non-Jewish education.⁶⁴ Yet such a view fails to recognize that this was not due to a lack of appreciation for the importance of teaching about the Holocaust but a reflection of its purposes in this period: to strengthen Jewish group identity through collective memory. This was increasingly evident from the early 1970s in the Board of Deputies’ growing interest in both educational presentations and classroom teaching about the Holocaust. However, in order for Holocaust education to take on a form that is familiar today, it had to be able to surpass the boundaries imposed by the use of history education to construct group identity.

The development of contemporary Holocaust education, 1976–1983

The late 1970s were a crucial period for the development of Holocaust education in Britain. British society was gradually becoming more receptive to public discussion of the Holocaust; Pearce has described a ‘“turn” to the Holocaust in British culture from the mid-1970s’ that was established through popular broadcasts such as the ‘Genocide’ episode of The World at War and Kitty: Return to Auschwitz.⁶⁵ This was built upon by an increased institutional attention towards Holocaust memorialization with the establishment of the Yad Vashem Committee United Kingdom (YVCUK) in 1976. It was at this juncture at the end of the 1970s that a cosmopolitan memory of the Holocaust began to take hold in Britain: alongside concerns about contemporary racism in the United Kingdom and a radically changing view of the purposes of history teaching, these conditions allowed for the transformation of Holocaust education from being a traditional tool of collective memory to a site of cosmopolitan memory.⁶⁶

Earlier initiatives to establish systematic teaching about the Holocaust had faltered due to the practical difficulties faced by the Education and Youth Committee. The establishment of the YVCUK between 1976 and 1977 was thus pivotal in allowing members of the Anglo-Jewish community to begin a more effective effort to introduce the Holocaust to schools; it is in the records of that organization that the first signs of a concerted effort to teach about the Holocaust in both Jewish and non-Jewish schools can be found. Yad Vashem, the organizational body based in Jerusalem that was tasked with memorializing the Holocaust, had been involved in its teaching in Israeli schools since the late 1950s.⁶⁷ Its British arm was established to raise funds for Israel as well as encourage commemoration and education of the Holocaust in the United Kingdom, which was partly driven by increasing fears about Holocaust denial following the publication of an anonymous pamphlet entitled Did the Six Million Really Die? in the early 1970s.⁶⁸ One of the earliest meetings established that:

there is an enormous demand from the Jewish community for an educational service which will provide educational facilities and material to both Jewish and non-Jewish schools, colleges and youth groups on the Holocaust [with] appropriate specialist bodies, both Jewish and non-Jewish.⁶⁹

This was soon followed by the creation of educational packs that would be trialed in twenty schools.⁷⁰ Between 1977 and 1980, the YVCUK continued to produce educational materials and promote the teaching of the Holocaust, aiming to eventually include ‘Holocaust studies in curricula of all schools – primary, secondary and senior.’⁷¹ By recognizing the need for Holocaust education in mainstream schools – and due to its ability to devote more resources than the Board of Deputies’ Education and Youth Committee – the YVCUK transformed teaching about the Holocaust in Britain and was an invaluable part of the creation of the field of Holocaust education as it is understood today.

This development was dependent on transnational connections which helped to overcome the more insular attitudes of Anglo-Jewry that had marked Holocaust commemoration in Britain up to this point. Some British Jews were worried about the increasing assertiveness of YVCUK and the committee made an effort to highlight its caution.⁷² When discussing Holocaust education publicly, the Board of Deputies emphasized how ‘we shall only be sending [teaching materials] to teachers who ask for it.’⁷³ The second conference on Jewish life in modern Britain in 1977 shared a lack of consideration for Holocaust education with its predecessor fifteen years earlier, suggesting that there was little reason to believe that Anglo-Jewish institutions would have made the leap to promoting non-Jewish Holocaust education in the late 1970s without Yad Vashem.⁷⁴ The YVCUK was therefore working within an international context at a time when there was an emerging global ‘memory community’ that was centered around the Holocaust; the Six-Day War in 1967 and the Yom Kippur War in 1973 had energized the global Jewish diaspora, while cultural representations of the genocide – such as the 1978 American series Holocaust which was broadcast across the West – grew.⁷⁵ The YVCUK’s efforts were fundamentally part of this transnational phenomenon. They drew from examples of Holocaust education across the world, although the committee was always aware that any ideas had to be adapted to the British context.⁷⁶ Similarly, members of the YVCUK took part in international discussions, such as a conference on Jewish education in Boston in 1982.⁷⁷ It was through these transnational connections that the process of overcoming the previous representations of the Holocaust in education – or lack thereof – for national or communal interests was able to begin, instead linking it to the nascent cosmopolitan memory of the Holocaust.

For these efforts to have some success, however, there needed to be a wider shift in the culture of history education in Britain. The substantial changes to history teaching in the 1970s and early 1980s highlight the usefulness of cosmopolitan memory when describing contemporary Holocaust education, beyond simply as a recognition of its international origins. On a practical level, the 1970s saw the increasing adoption of twentieth-century history in school syllabi; O Level courses on world history were becoming more popular, with units such as ‘The Rise and Fall of Nazi Germany’ and the Second World War often included.⁷⁸ Compared to the earlier reluctance to cover the twentieth century, this meant that there was more space in schools for the teaching of the Holocaust by the late 1970s. More importantly, the assumptions that had shaped history teaching in Britain for most of the twentieth century – and ensured that any teaching about the Holocaust would be limited at best – had begun to come under increasing criticism from the late 1960s.⁷⁹ Fears about history being seen as a ‘useless and boring subject’ which was ‘basically – and obstinately – a survey of British history’ in an increasingly multicultural society led to a break from the ‘inherited consensus.’⁸⁰ This meant that history teachers gradually began to prioritize present-oriented civic education and encouraged personal understandings of identity, rather than simply reproducing a national collective memory. This can be seen in the teaching materials of the Schools Council History Project, which had by the 1980s ‘found their way into a majority of schools.’⁸¹ These emphasized the need for pupils ‘to understand the world in which they live […] the need to find their personal identity [and] the need to develop the ability to think critically.’⁸² With less emphasis on the need to convey a positive British narrative about the Second World War, this onset of what has been widely called the ‘new history’ produced the conceptual space for the teaching of the Holocaust. Crucially, the assertion that history teaching should be relevant to the issues of contemporary society was emerging at a point when those issues were largely centered around racism, immigration, and multiculturalism.⁸³ It was widely believed that education had a role to play in strengthening inter-communal relations in an increasingly multicultural Britain.⁸⁴ At the same time, the late 1970s saw the far-right National Front become a loud presence on the fringes of British political life and, as a response to this, the emergence of a politics that prioritized anti-racism and anti-fascism.⁸⁵ When teachers tried to put this ‘new history’ into practice, they would thus focus on historical topics that dealt with these issues, a significant change from history education in Britain just a decade earlier.

It was these changes to the wider culture of history education in Britain that ensured that when the YVCUK aimed to engage non-Jewish teachers in Holocaust education, they were able to have some success. In 1980, Clive Lawton – the committee’s education officer – established a working party and called for assistance from teachers across England.⁸⁶ This first of all enabled Lawton to recognize some of the objections that teachers had to teaching the Holocaust as a specific subject, which generally focused on the practical issues of a ‘vicious circle’ of insufficient time and materials, rather than conceptual objections.⁸⁷ Despite this, Lawton did succeed in receiving responses from teachers, many of whom contributed their own materials and ideas about teaching the Nazis’ treatment of Jews.⁸⁸ The YVCUK had therefore created a network of teachers interested in Holocaust education, allowing the work of the committee to spread through mainstream schools across the country. This initiative produced an understanding of Holocaust education that clearly shared the principles of the ‘new history.’ It created a pedagogy that featured the ‘temporal duality’ of cosmopolitan memory of the Holocaust, whereby ‘the Holocaust past is something that happened predominantly to the Jews, while the Holocaust future might happen to anyone,’ ensuring that the Holocaust was taught in a way that linked it explicitly to contemporary events.⁸⁹ A 1981 report argued that Holocaust education should be linked to civic education and the political issues of the present, suggesting:

that our twentieth-century ‘global village’ is currently facing problems – and that of racism in particular – of which aspects echo, however faintly, problems of those earlier times whose culmination was the Holocaust […] if ever an historical event had ‘lessons’ for us today, the Holocaust is surely it.⁹⁰

That this conceptualization of Holocaust education cannot be separated from the wider educational context is further seen in the working party’s emphasis on developing empathy, a skill that was first identified as a crucial part of history teaching in a 1971 pamphlet that would shape the development of the ‘new history.’⁹¹ This was originally conceived as a key part of the disciplinary focus of the ‘new history,’ with children using empathy to learn how historians reconstruct historical ways of thinking, although it was soon ‘taken to signify the need for affective engagement with predecessors, for sympathy and identification with striving and suffering.’⁹² It was this distortion of the disciplinary emphasis of the ‘new history’ that further encouraged a civic-oriented approach to teaching about the Holocaust. In the records of the YVCUK working party, students were encouraged to imagine how they would have acted as bystanders, while they were asked ‘are these people really not, as our leaders tell us, after all only people like ourselves, even though they are Jews/Gypsies/Poles?’⁹³ This intended to promote moral reflection and discussion among the students and it was likely that such discussion would invite explicit comparisons to how minorities were treated in contemporary Britain. Having established the theoretical aims of this new Holocaust education, the working party began a concerted effort to develop teaching materials in the early 1980s. Development of a program of Holocaust survivors speaking in schools began in 1981, while there was already a ‘makeshift’ pupil’s pack available at this time.⁹⁴ These endeavors were novel in their view of the Holocaust as a unique topic in history with its own strategies for teaching; the idea of survivors speaking in school particularly reflected the importance that was placed on an emotional as well as a factual understanding of the events. The committee slowly began to translate their ideas into practice: by 1982, training seminars for teachers were being organized while materials for educators were being piloted in three schools.⁹⁵ Although they were often stifled by practical issues such as scheduling, these efforts continued throughout the 1980s.

By this point, then, the institution of Holocaust education in Britain had begun. This had depended on a shift in Anglo-Jewry towards spreading Holocaust memory through education, a change towards a present-oriented and multicultural form of British history teaching, and an increased global emphasis on Holocaust memory. Rather than being understood as a tool for communal identity and commemoration, these conditions produced a form of teaching about the Holocaust that believed it could establish a cosmopolitan identity that was based on values instead of a national or ethnic community; the late 1970s and early 1980s were therefore crucial in establishing Holocaust education as a location for learning ‘lessons’ for the present, an understanding that continues to shape how the events are taught today.⁹⁶ Beginning with the establishment of the YVCUK, which proved crucial in extending the idea of Holocaust education beyond the confines of Jewish education and in providing transnational connections, the changing culture of history teaching had allowed this understanding of Holocaust education to begin to flourish.

Holocaust education in practice, 1983–1991

It was only by the middle of the 1980s that practical materials for teaching the Holocaust began to catch up with the discussions that had been taking place in Britain since 1976. Despite its crucial role in producing the first organized Holocaust education initiative, the YVCUK’s intentions to produce a widely available set of teaching materials about the Holocaust were never fully realized. They were, in the words of Clive Lawton, ‘overtaken by the arrival of the Auschwitz exhibition and the great ILEA teaching pack that accompanied it.’⁹⁷ Regardless, there was a small degree of institutional overlap between the YVCUK and this exhibition, while there were also considerable similarities between the cosmopolitan understanding of Holocaust education developed through the YVCUK’s work and the materials that were produced to accompany the exhibition. Taking place in Whitechapel in 1983, the Auschwitz exhibition was the first significant museum exhibition that dealt with the Holocaust in Britain.⁹⁸ Established by a diverse mix of Jewish and non-Jewish organizations, the exhibition attracted over 10,000 school students, most of whom came from secular schools.⁹⁹ While the YVCUK was involved in its production, the exhibition was primarily a local initiative that was run by an independent group, the East London Auschwitz Exhibition Committee (ELAEC). Nevertheless, the ELAEC emphasized the importance of Holocaust education and the role that the exhibition could play in its development. It ‘insisted that schools should provide students with instruction prior to exhibition visits’ and therefore produced teaching materials to accompany the exhibition.¹⁰⁰ This eventually developed – with assistance from Clive Lawton – into an ‘expanded set of classroom resources’ that included factual sheets, a guide for teachers, and videos.¹⁰¹ This set of classroom resources was produced and distributed by the ILEA, the institution responsible for education in Greater London. Controlled by the local left-wing Labour Party, the ILEA had a history of progressive attitudes and local activism; this both created space for this early Holocaust education to grow and ensured that it would quickly become politicized.¹⁰² Although Kushner suggested that ‘the pack was never circulated due to political opposition,’ this is incorrect: while political controversy did result in the ILEA pausing dissemination of the pack in the second half of the 1980s, by 1986 it had been purchased by 255 schools and the materials continued to be used long after the controversy.¹⁰³ This meant that these were the first widespread classroom resources related to Holocaust education and they should be seen as a foundational aspect of British Holocaust education.

The title of the pack, Auschwitz: Yesterday’s Racism, suggests the importance of a cosmopolitan memory of the Holocaust to teaching about the subject. The materials produced to accompany the exhibition explicitly drew comparisons between the persecution of Jews in the 1930s and the rise of racism in London’s East End in the 1970s and 1980s. It included personal testimonies from both Holocaust survivors and members of minority communities in 1980s London while it also placed prints of Nazi propaganda alongside contemporary racist posters.¹⁰⁴ The pack ended with an epilogue which argued that ‘the situation in Britain today is not dissimilar to that in Germany fifty years ago […] this is fertile ground to gain converts. Auschwitz shows where this can lead.’¹⁰⁵ Notes to teachers suggested that they should ‘look at the activities of groups such as Amnesty International and the Anti-Apartheid Movement,’ which followed many of the guidelines identified by the YVCUK at the start of the decade.¹⁰⁶ It also therefore reflected the changes to the culture of history teaching that had been taking place in the 1970s and 1980s, that aimed to enable students to directly link their study of history to the present; it would have been almost unthinkable only a decade earlier that such materials would be used in schools. It was these comparisons to the present, however, which ensnared the Auschwitz pack in the center of a heated political debate once the ILEA began to distribute it in 1985. The ‘new history’ was increasingly becoming a target of politicians on the right wing of the ruling Conservative Party, who wanted to restore a history curriculum that was ‘rooted in nationalism.’¹⁰⁷ In a debate on this issue in the House of Lords in 1986, Baroness Cox used the ELAEC/ILEA pack as an example of ‘political indoctrination’ in education.¹⁰⁸ Attacking the materials’ comparisons between Nazi policies and Conservative legislation, Cox and others were responding to the political implications of a history education that saw itself as outside of the service of the nation-state. Although the ILEA decided to withdraw the pack in response to the controversy, this only affirmed the YVCUK’s belief in ‘how important it is for this committee to pursue relentlessly its aim of Holocaust education.’¹⁰⁹ Pearce is correct in asserting that this debate had more to do with wider ‘political circumstances’ than any substantive argument about the teaching of the Holocaust; ultimately, Cox did not attack the materials due to a difference of opinion about how best to memorialize the Holocaust but due to fears about the Labour-controlled ILEA using education for party-political purposes.¹¹⁰ However, the controversy over the ELAEC/ILEA pack did demonstrate how far Holocaust education had developed into a site of memory that was intrinsically linked to a contemporary politics that was increasingly polarized over multiculturalism: the cosmopolitan values that Holocaust education aimed to instill were politically contestable in a way that traditional national identity was not.

As the only mass-produced teaching resource about the Holocaust from this period, the ELAEC/ILEA pack of materials is a valuable example of the influence of the YVCUK on Holocaust education. However, the decentralized nature of school history curricula in the 1980s means that it is difficult to assess the extent to which a cosmopolitan understanding of Holocaust education had taken hold across the country. Despite this, it is clear that those pupils who directly engaged with the ELAEC/ILEA pack were not the only ones who experienced a value-oriented Holocaust education; instead, cosmopolitan attitudes can be seen throughout references to teaching about the Holocaust in the 1980s. The first reference to teaching about the Holocaust in the history teachers’ journal Teaching History came in 1983, with a report on lessons about the Holocaust in a school in Hull. The author argued that ‘the humane values of the children seemed to have been strengthened’ and that ‘their dislike of racial discrimination was very strong.’¹¹¹ While only describing a scheme of work in a single school, there was clearly a wider expectation that history lessons about the Holocaust should aim to establish a set of moral qualities in pupils. Similar attitudes can be seen in John Fox’s survey of schools in 1987. When asked about their teaching of the Holocaust, many of the respondents said that they linked it to contemporary issues, such as racist ‘attitudes and organizations in contemporary British and Western society, including the United States of America.’¹¹² This was an attitude that the authors of the report were cautious about – with Antony Polonsky arguing in his introduction that the Holocaust should not solely provide ‘the starting-point for discussions of contemporary racial hatred and other acts of genocide in the modern world’ – but there is no doubt that Holocaust education in Britain had by the end of the 1980s become a site of civic education.¹¹³ This was perhaps an inevitable side-effect of the growing proliferation of Holocaust education in Britain; after all, Fox’s report showed that many schools were now teaching about the Holocaust while the YVCUK themselves had noticed an increase in Holocaust education, especially around requests for survivors to give talks to schools.¹¹⁴ The contemporary field of Holocaust education – further institutionalized following the first meeting of the Holocaust Educational Trust in 1988 – was therefore firmly established by the end of the 1980s. This was a field that had its intellectual foundations in the work of the YVCUK in the late 1970s rather than the earlier initiatives that were supported by the Board of Deputies, as it was the YVCUK’s cosmopolitan model of memory that allowed the Holocaust to be seen as relevant and appropriate for young people while also following the demands of the wider culture of history teaching. This ensured that the first widely used materials relating to the Holocaust – the ELAEC pack – as well as wider attitudes all saw teaching about the Holocaust as a way to promote multicultural values that were linked to the political and social issues of the present.

Conclusion

By the 1990s, the use of the Holocaust for civic education had become entrenched in British schooling with the creation of the National Curriculum for History. When lobbying for the subject’s inclusion in the first national syllabus, the YVCUK presented the Holocaust as ‘one of the central questions of modern civilization’ and repeatedly linked the need for Holocaust education with ‘questions of modern racism.’¹¹⁵ This framing shaped how those who designed the National Curriculum explained their inclusion of the Holocaust: they argued that ‘the story of racism has not ended.’¹¹⁶ At the same time, as teachers – many of whom had no prior experience of teaching the Holocaust – searched for teaching materials, they invariably drew on the resources produced in the 1980s. The National Curriculum should not therefore be seen as the beginning of contemporary Holocaust education in Britain. Instead, while it was certainly a crucial turning point in expanding and institutionalizing Holocaust education, the specific qualities of this field were shaped by the removal of Holocaust memory from traditional forms of collective memory that began a decade earlier. These qualities continued to be central to teaching about the Holocaust, even if they were at times contested.¹¹⁷ Meanwhile, a report published in 2023 has shown that the cosmopolitan aims of Holocaust education remain prevalent among teachers.¹¹⁸

This article has emphasized the critical importance of the late 1970s and early 1980s in the making of this contemporary field of Holocaust education. Before this period, teaching about the past in the United Kingdom rested upon a traditional understanding of collective memory as a foundational part of group identity. In mainstream schools, the Holocaust was therefore rarely taught, with nationalist narratives of the Second World War instead dominating when twentieth-century history was included in the classroom. Jewish educational organizations followed this trend, in line with the wider strategy of Anglo-Jewry to downplay the specifically Jewish aspects of identity, and thus ignored the early calls for Holocaust education that came from outside Britain. Although this changed with the increasing self-confidence of Anglo-Jewry – which allowed the Board of Deputies to begin educational initiatives such as the Warsaw Ghetto presentations in the early 1970s – the early form of Holocaust education that this produced nevertheless existed under the same framework of collective memory as the nationalist narratives that preceded it, albeit directed towards Jewish rather than British identity. However, the growing movement towards Holocaust education as it is understood today that began in the late 1970s was fundamentally different. The arrival of Yad Vashem in the United Kingdom was crucial: it ensured that a new global cosmopolitan memory of the Holocaust overcame the traditional memory strategies that had shaped education in Britain up to this point. This coincided with a ‘new history’ which aimed to update history teaching to an increasingly multicultural country, thus allowing the YVCUK to effectively promote a Holocaust education that sought not to use the past to create traditional forms of identity but to produce attitudes that were better suited to this multicultural society. This understanding of Holocaust education was then increasingly evident in the classroom throughout the 1980s, with materials such as the ELAEC/ILEA pack using the Holocaust to encourage students to reflect on contemporary racism and inequality, before it was formally established in the National Curriculum.

Unlike other accounts of the history of British Holocaust education, this article has emphasized the historical process from which the specific qualities of contemporary Holocaust education – principally the use of the Holocaust to promote tolerant values – developed. It has argued that these qualities differentiated Holocaust education from older forms of history education: rather than aiming to produce a traditional collective memory, the growth of contemporary Holocaust education has been an example of cosmopolitan memory in practice. This analysis thus historicizes the cosmopolitan form of Holocaust education as a product of the political, cultural, and educational contexts of the late twentieth century. Recognition of this fact is especially necessary at a time when the ability of Holocaust education to achieve the aims first outlined in the 1970s appears uncertain, and while these aims themselves remain contested.¹¹⁹ In this context, historicizing the cosmopolitan form of Holocaust education may help researchers to consider alternative methods for teaching about the Holocaust, while further study of previously overlooked initiatives – such as those developed by the Board of Deputies in the early 1970s – can only enlighten the field of Holocaust education.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to David Patrick at the University of Sheffield for his guidance, support, and encouragement. I also want to express thanks to the archivists at the London Metropolitan Archives, Manchester Central Library, and the UCL Historical Textbooks Collection, as well as to the Board of Deputies for allowing access to their records.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Samuel Day

Samuel Day is a researcher and history teacher. He is interested in the politics, philosophy, and practice of history education and he conducted his research in the history of Holocaust education while completing his BA in History and Postgraduate Diploma in Education at the University of Sheffield.

Notes

1 Foster et al., What do Students Know and Understand about the Holocaust?, 7. Pearce, “Challenges, Issues and Controversies,” 7.

2 Roth, “Foreword,” xi.

3 Foster, “To What Extent does the Acquisition of Historical Knowledge Really Matter when Studying the Holocaust?,” 29.

4 Pearce, Holocaust Consciousness in Contemporary Britain, 53.

5 Foster and Karayianni, “Portrayals of the Holocaust in English History Textbooks,” 319.

6 Crawford, “A Vicious and Barbarous Enemy,” 531–2.

7 Hector, “Teaching the Holocaust in England,” 106.

8 Short and Reed, Issues in Holocaust Education, 15–16.

9 Russell, Teaching the Holocaust in School History, 62.

10 Pearce, Holocaust Consciousness in Contemporary Britain, 48.

11 Kushner, The Holocaust and the Liberal Imagination, 261.

12 Ferro, The Use and Abuse of History, viii.

13 Levy and Sznaider, The Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age, 197.

14 Levy and Sznaider, “Memory Unbound,” 88.

15 See for instance: Macdonald, Memorylands, 215.

16 Assmann, “The Holocaust – A Global Memory?,” 114.

17 Kushner, The Holocaust and the Liberal Imagination, 207.

18 Slater, The Politics of History Teaching, 1.

19 Ministry of Education, Teaching History, quoted in Cannadine, Keating, and Sheldon, The Right Kind of History, 113.

20 Sylvester, “Change and Continuity in History Teaching 1900–93,” 28.

21 Firth, History Second Series Book Five, 149.

22 Ibid.

23 Caven, “Horror in Our Time,” 228.

24 Kushner, “Memory of Anne Frank,” 6–7.

25 Crawford, “A Vicious and Barbarous Enemy,” 532–3.

26 Carter, The Search for Peace, 97.

27 Mowat Kelly, Recent Times, 282–3.

28 Ibid., 244.

29 Derry, British History from 1760 to 1964, 326.

30 Bryant and Ecclestone, World Outlook 1900–1965, 114–7.

31 Haydn, “History in Schools,” 277.

32 Kushner, “Memory of Anne Frank,” 8.

33 Bermant, Troubled Eden, 129.

34 Livshin, “The Acculturation of the Children of Immigrant Jews,” 82.

35 Endelman, Jews of Britain, 258.

36 Stone, “The Domestication of Violence,” 16.

37 Kushner, The Holocaust and the Liberal Imagination, 241.

38 Manchester Central Library: Manchester City Council Education Department, Schools’ Records, GB127.M790/2/15, Syllabus for Talmud Torah Schools and Advanced Synagogue Classes, 1949.

39 Shaul Esh, in Jewish Life in Modern Britain, 88.

40 ‘Ignorance of the Holocaust,’ The Jewish Chronicle, 4 March 1960, 28.

41 Ibid.

42 ‘Manchester remembers Warsaw martyrs,’ The Jewish Chronicle, 24 April 1964, 23.

43 Ibid.

44 Ibid.

45 Macdonald, “Commemorating the Holocaust,” 46.

46 ‘London Exhibition on Warsaw Ghetto,’ The Times, 9 June 1961, 6.

47 Kushner, The Holocaust and the Liberal Imagination, 241.

48 Endelman, Jews of Britain, 236.

49 Minutes of the Education and Youth Committee (EYC), 12 October 1972. London Metropolitan Archives (LMA), Board of Deputies of British Jews (BoD) Collection, ref. ACC/3121/C/08/001/011.

50 Ibid.

51 Memorandum from Miss B.J. Barwell to Members of the EYC and the Warsaw Ghetto and Holocaust Commemoration Sub-Committee, 10 November 1972. LMA, BoD Collection, ref. ACC/3121/C/08/001/011.

52 Minutes of the EYC, 10 April 1973. LMA, BoD Collection, ref. ACC/3121/C/08/001/011.

53 Minutes of the EYC, 26 June 1973. LMA, BoD Collection, ref. ACC/3121/C/08/001/011.

54 Minutes of the EYC, 25 February 1974. LMA, BoD Collection, ref. ACC/3121/C/08/001/011.

55 Minutes of the EYC, 1 May 1974. LMA, BoD Collection, ref. ACC/3121/C/08/001/011.

56 Annual Reports of the BoD, 1973-1976, 65. Manchester Central Library, Bill Williams Papers, ref. GB127.M790/2/11.

57 Minutes of the EYC, 7 April 1975. LMA, BoD Collection, ref. ACC/3121/C/08/001/012.

58 Minutes of the EYC, 19 June 1975. LMA, BoD Collection, ref. ACC/3121/C/08/001/012.

59 ‘Christians admit biased teaching’, The Jewish Chronicle, July 25 1975, 4.

60 Annual Reports of the BoD, 1973–1976, 66. Manchester Central Library, Bill Williams Papers, ref. GB127.M790/2/11.

61 Minutes of the EYC, 7 July 1975. LMA, BoD Collection, ref. ACC/3121/C/08/001/012.

62 Ibid.

63 Kushner, The Holocaust and the Liberal Imagination, 256.

64 Cesarani, “Great Britain,” 628–9.

65 Pearce, Holocaust Consciousness in Contemporary Britain, 183.

66 Ibid., 184.

67 Blutinger, “Yad Vashem and the State of Holocaust Education,” 129–30.

68 Berman, Holocaust Agendas, 27–28.

69 Memorandum of Educational Proposals and Possibilities for the YVCUK by Rabbi Hugo Gryn and Paul Shaw, 28 March 1977. LMA, BoD Collection, ref. ACC/3121/C/23/001/001.

70 Minutes of the YVCUK, 15 September 1977. LMA, BoD Collection, ref. ACC/3121/C/23/001/001.

71 Memorandum to Members of the YVCUK by Frank Green, 14 March 1979. LMA, BoD Collection, ref. ACC/3121/C/23/001/001.

72 YVCUK Chairman’s Report, 2 April 1979, 2. LMA, BoD Collection, ref. ACC/3121/C/23/001/001.

73 Paul Shaw, quoted in Colin Cross, ‘Jews plan to counter race propaganda,’ The Observer, 17 July 1977, 3.

74 Papers of the Second Conference on Jewish life in modern Britain, 1977. LMA, BoD Collection, ref. ACC/3121/E/04/0180.

75 Assmann, “The Holocaust – A Global Memory?,” 113.

76 Minutes of the YVCUK, 10 March 1980. LMA, BoD Collection, ref. ACC/3121/C/23/001/001.

77 ‘Britons praised at Brandeis conference,’ The Jewish Chronicle, 10 September 1982, 4.

78 Cannadine, Keating, and Sheldon, The Right Kind of History, 155–6.

79 Husbands, Kitson, and Pendry, Understanding History Teaching, 10–11.

80 Price, “History in Danger,” 343–4.

81 Sylvester, “Change and Continuity in History Teaching 1900–93,” 35.

82 Schools Council History 13-16 Project, A New Look at History, 12.

83 Solomos, Race and Racism in Britain, 64.

84 Heater, A History of Education for Citizenship, 99.

85 Higgs, “From the Street to the State,” 78.

86 ‘Teaching the Holocaust,’ The Guardian, 17 June 1980, 12.

87 Report of Meeting of Working Party to produce Holocaust Teaching Aids, 30 October 1980. LMA, BoD Collection, ref. ACC/3121/C/23/001/001.

88 See for instance: Letter from Stephen Nokes to Clive Lawton, 3 May 1981. LMA, BoD Collection, ref. ACC/3121/E/05/009.

89 Levy and Sznaider, “Memory Unbound,” 96.

90 Report of the Meeting of the Working Party to Produce Holocaust Teaching Aids, 9 February 1981. LMA, BoD Collection, ref. ACC/3121/E/05/009.

91 Coltham and Fines, Educational Objectives for the Study of History, 8.

92 Lee and Shemilt, “Should Empathy Come Out of the Closet?,” 39–40.

93 Report of the Meeting of the Working Party to Produce Holocaust Teaching Aids, 9 February 1981. LMA, BoD Collection, ref. ACC/3121/E/05/009.

94 Report of the Education Officer to the YVCUK, March 1981. LMA, BoD Collection, ref. ACC/3121/C/23/001/001.

95 Minutes of the YVCUK, 13 January 1982. LMA, BoD Collection, ref. ACC/3121/C/23/001/001.

96 Chapman, “Learning the Lessons of the Holocaust,” 50–51.

97 Lawton, Review of Issues in Holocaust Education, 279.

98 Kushner, The Holocaust and the Liberal Imagination, 261.

99 McDonald, “Memory Protagonists,” 131–2.

100 Ibid., 141.

101 Ibid., 142–5.

102 McCulloch, “Histories of Urban Education,” 1013.

103 Kushner, The Holocaust and the Liberal Imagination, 261–2. McDonald, “Memory Protagonists,” 145.

104 Auschwitz: An Exhibition (London, 1983).

105 Ibid., 47.

106 Russell, Teaching the Holocaust, 64.

107 Crawford, “A History of the Right,” 447.

108 Baroness Cox, quoted in Pearce, Holocaust Consciousness in Contemporary Britain, 52.

109 Minutes of the YVCUK, 20 June 1986. LMA, BoD Collection, ref. ACC/3121/C/23/001/002.

110 Pearce, Holocaust Consciousness in Contemporary Britain, 52.

111 Farrar, “Report: Teaching the Holocaust,” 24.

112 Fox, Report on 1987 Survey, 12.

113 Anthony Polonsky, in ibid., 1. As well as Polonsky’s objections, members of the YVCUK were also worried about universalisation, ensuring that moderations were made to the ELAEC exhibition’s contemporary comparisons: McDonald, “Memory Protagonists,” 144–5.

114 Minutes of the YVCUK, 9 July 1987. LMA, BoD Collection, ref. ACC/3121/C/23/001/002.

115 Kushner, The Holocaust and the Liberal Imagination, 263.

116 Letter to Carrie Supple from a member of the History Working Group, 21 June 1990, quoted in Russell, Teaching the Holocaust, 96 [emphasis in original].

117 See for example: Kinloch, “Learning about the Holocaust,” 44–46.

118 Hale et al., Continuity and Change, 120.

119 Chapman, “Learning the Lessons of the Holocaust,” 66–69.